In the early days of the internet, the meta ‘keyword’ tag was the most important information used by some early search engines to determine relevance hence ranking. However, that was the past. Now, the keyword tag is ignored by most search engines due to the abuse. It doesn’t take too much imagination to realise that people could literally cram their ‘meta’ area with all sorts of information utterly irrelevant to the content itself.

So it doesn’t matter if you use the keyword meta tag or not. However, if you do include, do remember be careful not to repeat any word and include only your most important keywords - those that you actually use in the content.

The meta tag that you should be concerned about is the Meta Description Tag.

Here’s how the meta tag looks like when you view the page’s source code:

<meta name=”description” content=”One or two sentences to describe the page consisting of keywords”>

The words in the description will be used by the search algorithm to have a snapshot of your web page. Furthermore, major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN Search results are displaying this description when you used the keywords here (see left).

This is important because a well written description will attract the search to click and come to your web site. This small but important detail is often overlooked by most webmasters and web designers.

The title tag carries more weight than any other HTML tags as far as on-page Search Engine Optimisation is concerned.

In HTML source, look for Title Tag:
<title>Title of web page consisting keywords</title>
near the top of the file. Visually, it appears at the top of the browser window (see below).
All the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN Search place emphasis on the words that appear in the title tag.

The spiders use these words to determine what the rest of your page is about. The title bar should consist of words that describe your page and should include the most important keywords or phrases.

You should check all the title tags of your web pages. Each title bar should be unique and descriptive. I usually use between three to ten words in the title tag to indicate what the page is about.

Unique title tag is liken to the numbering of each unit in a building - imagine the confusion when you walking into an apartment block with same number at every unit!

Tips for writing your Title Tag

• Avoid repeating keywords more than once in the title bars, and make sure that identical words are not next to each other.
• As the text within the title tag will be used in the listing of your Web site in the search engine results, it is important that your title bar sounds interesting enough for searcher to click at it.

Sometimes a good reminder about the basics of search engines does us all good - even us SEO geeks. Many people started to get out of the habit of getting good quality meta